We all need a little lift in our lives. Gritty reality is hard to take all of the time. Crawling out of bed at the shrill of the alarm, waiting for the bus, sitting on the overcrowded train with someone who's just eaten onions breathing down your neck, trying to make the kids see reason, overhauling your budget. All of these things need to be pushed into the background once in a while. We need to sit down and read something which makes us laugh, makes us cry and has a happy ending. The story of Cinderella is a perfect example. There she is, working in the kitchen, despised by her step-sisters, ignored by her step-mother, no one to love her. Awwww. And then she gets the chance to go to a ball. And - disaster - she loses a slipper (it is actually not a glass slipper but a green slipper, the translation from French to English mixed up the French word for glass verre with the word for green vert as they are both pronounced similarly in French). Prince Charming searches for her, and lo and behold, the slipper he found fits Cinderella and they both live happily ever after. We return to our normal routine with a smile on our faces.
Of course we all know that not everything ends happily and there are plenty of stories out there which do not finish with the hero and heroine setting off in the golden coach to a life of complete happiness. We know that a certain amount of conflict is necessary to live successful lives. Often, in the past, when confronted with numerous tricky situations at work, I'd ask myself if what I wanted was a quiet, uneventful 9 to 5 job or the hurly burly of a multitude of challenges and problems to be solved which is what I had! I can tell you the hurly burly won out!
Supposing Cinderella just went to the ball and met Prince Charming and they got together straight away? It would be a dull story. Writers introduce conflict into stories, that is part of the craft of writing. Will Jack and Jill end up together or will something interfere and separate them for good? When we start reading Romance, we expect a happy ending and it is the skill and the task of the author to keep us interested in how things turn out, how the conflicts are resolved.
These are the ideas behind the two romance novels I have written. I recently met one of my readers who told me how much she enjoyed my novels. "Real page-turners" she said. I don't know a nicer compliment - it made my day!
